Greg: CA arcserve is now even better. We just launched the next generation data protection solution; CA arcserve Unified Data Protection.

Chris: Hmmm, sounds interesting is it complicated? Is it hard to implement? How many consoles does it use?

Greg: No actually it is quite simple. It is one comprehensive solution that can be managed from one central location, protecting physical and or virtual platforms, on premise or off-premise with granular recovery for your critical applications like MS-Exchange, and MS-SQL.

Chris: Is it easy to license.

Greg: Yes but talk to your sales rep I work in presales, so tell me about your solution requirements….

Chris: Were you listening? you’re a doctor your supposed to listen…not talk all the time.

Greg: Well when we scripted this you wanted to lay on a couch and sleep and now your telling me to be quiet, figures.

Chris: Really? are you done….so as I mentioned can CA arcserve Unified Data Protection protect my local and remote locations? At each of my locations I have a combination of physical and virtual servers running on Windows and Linux and multiple applications and databases such as MS-Exchange, and MS-SQL.

Greg: Yes it does, using arcserve Unified Data Protection agent technology; we can deploy agents to perform backups of your local and remote locations, leveraging incremental forever technology on Windows writing data to a local UNC destination or Recovery Point Server and then replicate that data to a remote Recovery Point Server located at your Data Center.

Chris: Can you also explain incremental forever? I heard about it but I am confused.

Greg: Incremental forever is the ability to only backup the changed blocks after on a workstation/server after performing a full backup. This technology will minimize the impact to your production environment, eliminating any backup window constraints. I should mention this works on physical or virtual platforms, hence the disappearance of Dr. V.

Chris: That sounds like a space saver, another question please, what is a Recovery Point Server?

Greg: A Recovery Point Server is the target or destination, this is where you create your data store and can access your backed up data for quick local recovery or even bare metal recovery.

Chris: And that can be at local and or remote location? And run on a physical or virtual Windows Server?

Greg: Yes, also replication is now fully integrated to where you can replicate the data stored on a local recovery point server to a remote recovery point server or even the cloud. Depends on your requirements, and the available infrastructure.

Chris: Sounds like there are some other great features you should be plugging about now.

Greg: Yes, you are right, the Recovery Point Server that I previously described can use Global Deduplication where any backed up data from nodes, jobs or sites written to the Recovery Point Server will go through a global data deduplication process. This will reduce the load on production, offloading merge and backup catalog generation to the Recovery Point Server.

Chris: What if I have a large amount of data at each location and have small to no bandwidth available between locations?

Greg: Well for those situations you can take advantage of jumpstart data seeding or you may have heard the term offline synchronization. This is where you can physically move data from the primary RPS location to secondary RPS location using a hard drive, or even tape, a technical term for this is sneaker net.

Greg: Another great feature is you can take advantage of is High Availability.

Chris: Really?

Greg: Really…….yes you can setup CA arcserve Unified Data Protection to continuously replicate your critical system and or applications, for example MS-Exchange, and or MS-SQL at your local or primary location to a remote or secondary location. In the event of a system or application failure you can configure the replication task to automatically failover redirecting your users from the primary site to the remote site, in short near instant recovery.

Chris: Wow that really takes it to the next level, does it matter if physical and Virtual or even the cloud?

Greg: No, arcserve Unified Data Protection can support P2V and V2V, and the cloud. For example we can perform full system high availability to Amazon EC2. Let’s take the process of replicating the data from your primary location to the remote or secondary location I just described, replacing the secondary location with a cloud destination, the results will be the same, users will be redirected to the secondary or cloud location upon critical system or application failure.

Greg: What makes this even better is that you will be able to remove all doubt, you can setup automated DR-Testing with no impact to production, you are performing a failover and failback or as we call it “assured recovery tests”.

Greg: You also mentioned that you have Virtual Platforms that you need to protect. Is that correct? And do you have VMware and Hyper-V?

Chris: Well, yes we have VMware.

Greg: Before I jump to far ahead I should mention that as part of CA arcserve Unified Data Protection you can perform agentless backup of your VMware and Hyper-V Hosts.

Chris: This is amazing so no agents need to be deployed on each of the virtual guests?

Greg: Correct……arcserve Unified Data Protection integrates with the VMware vStorage API’s providing a centralized node and group plan to perform single pass backup of the VM Host without installing anything in the virtual guest. The amazing part is you will be able to perform granular recovery of files and folders from within each of the virtual guests.

Greg: Another great feature you can take advantage of is where you can take your image based backups or recovery points of your physical and virtual servers and perform a virtual standby.

Chris: So what you are saying is that I can take the image backup of my physical server and stand it up as a Virtual Guest in the event of a system or application issue.

Greg: That is correct, you can convert your recovery points into VHD or VMDK formats at local or remote site.

Chris: What about being able to scale, no environment remains static, what happens if we add a new server, Virtual Host and or application?

Greg: Well the beauty of CA arcserve UDP is it can scale from small to very large environments like yours where we can take individual elements that can be installed individually to increase performance & scalability.

Greg: So if I remember correctly there was another requirement, being able to archive data to tape or even the cloud.

Chris: Correct I need to have a complete solution as I have a compliance requirement to keep data for a period of 7 years.

Greg: Well, once again CA arcserve Unified Data Protection can meet this requirement where you can copy the recovery point server image backups to tape. You can also archive file based backups to disk, tape and cloud, i.e. Amazon, and MS-Azure.

Greg: One last thing Chris, being able to provide reports to your customers and management is critical, CA arcserve Unified Data Protection provides you with the ability to provide managed capacity reporting, job status reports, as well as CPU and Memory reporting.

Chris: Yes, I totally forget about the reporting requirements, I am very impressed.

Greg: and you should be, so I believe that this will meet the requirements you outlined and you see that CA arcserve Unified Data Protection is Assured Recovery.

Chris: Yes…

Greg: Well I think that went well, now it is time for you to review a couple of real-world examples of where arcserve met and solved customer requirements.

Greg: Well that about wraps it up, so here is my prescription…..please take one CA arcserve UDP and get…..